My dad once wrote a column about how sometimes a concept is difficult to translate not because you can’t think of the right expression but because there is none. Even if you somehow find a good way to describe what the original text says, anyone reading it in the target language will still have no idea what’s going on. These situations often indicate hard-to-pin-down differences in the way languages and cultures are.
I’ve started to run into this myself in my budding working life. I’m trying to “fix” the English in a presentation about a tourist resort and struggling with “programme services”. What is that? In Finnish it’s obviously been “ohjelmapalvelut”, but I suspected that in English “programme services” doesn’t mean anything. I googled the term and sure enough all the hits are either Finnish tourism brochure-type things (the top hit was Espoon Matkailu) or something to do with tv companies. Evidently, translators from Finnish have conspired to decide that this concept which apparently doesn’t exist in other languages is to be “programme services” no matter how little sense it makes. But I can’t possibly live with that, it’s just… wrong. So now I’ve agonised over it for maybe half an hour and come up with reworking the sentence completely to use “activity”, a wonderful word that turns up rather a lot in any commercial translation from Finnish to English.
I just hope there aren’t too many more ohjelmapalvelus coming up.
